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Report - RFA Grey Rover & RFA Sir Percivale - Liverpool - March 2010

28DL Full Member

The Canada graving docks in Liverpool is the final resting place of these two Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships which arrived late last year for demolition and disposal having been in naval service since 1969 and 1968 respectively.

RFA Sir Percivale is a Round Table class Landing Ship Logistics. In it's time in service, the ship was active in the Falklands, the first gulf war in 1991 and the Balkans. In September 2000, the ship was alongside in Freetown when British forces who had been taken hostage were rescued in a raid by the Parachute Regiment and the SAS. The ships most recent active service was in Iraq, 2003. RFA Grey Rover was a Rover class small fleet tanker which served in the same theatres as Percivale over the course of its life.

Our explore started out with the original intention of having a thorough recon of the site. I'm sure i don't need to go into huge detail as to the amount of things that can cause shit to hit the fan when your attempting to explore ex MOD property on a very active dockland. Suffice to say that recon showed our expectations to be pretty on the money. Multiple manned security huts, floodlights along the entire length of the dry dock and enough security cameras looking in all directions (including the gangways for both boats) to fill a warehouse all promised to ruin our fun, and that was without even considering the work force moving mass amounts of sand around in JCBs whose headlights spilled over our access point of choice threatening to rumble us at a moments notice.

At this point i would assume a sensible urbexer would call their recon a day and head back to take in something a bit less adventurous. Lucky for me then, that neither TheFlu24 or myself have ever been sensible Urbexers. We crafted together a plan of access while lying in the cover of some pipes used for draining the dry dock and set it into motion having gone over all the what-if scenarios. Suffice to say that 15 minutes of uncomfortable crawling and one insanely scary wobbly gangway later and we where standing on the bridge of RFA Percivale.

The 'If we get caught at least we got one shot' pic :

A few from a rather intact transmission room

An engine room - X marks the asbestos. The first time i have left my respirator in the car in god knows how long and this is what I'm greeted with !

Questionable graffiti in the frozen storage

Inside the main launching bay. Not a chance of getting the size of this place into a photo in the pitch dark...

...So we will use TheFlu24's 6foot odd frame as a comparison to the size of the door.

looking back towards the dock from the front of the ship.

The main mast...

...It seemed rude not to take a quick run up the ladder for a pic or two - we had our fun ruined by a helicopter taking a rather slow pass above us!

At this point we set off to make it onto the Grey Rover. Yet more painful/knackering tactics needed to be used to cross the open ground between the two vessels, but once on undetected we where greeted with a fantastic bridge.

We took a small break while TheFlu played with the levers and i caught up on pics, and then headed on to the top deck..

Nortons, the company being paid for scrapping

Cannon anyone ?

Thanks for looking guys, hope you enjoyed the fruits of an incredible explore !

Leaf

"How about you guys have a race ? Last one over the fence gets eaten by the dog ?"
- Manchester's finest armed response humour.